The Recently Extinct Plants and Animals Database cubit

Welcome to the Recently Extinct Plants and Animals Database (REPAD)!

The Recently Extinct Plants and Animals Database currently has 7,020 entries. These include 5,233 (sub)species which are "missing" and extinct, 233 which are extinct in the wild, and 1,554 which have been rediscovered.

While the database itself is still hosted here on Cubits.org, and will be for the next few years, I have already started to design and build my own dedicated website to house the database. It can be accessed at: http://www.recentlyextinctspecies.com If you have any questions whatsoever about either website, or about anything you've read here please don't hesitate to get into contact with me.

Species and subspecies are not only globally rediscovered but also sometimes locally rediscovered. Although, in many instances it is difficult to distinguish whether this kind of genuine rediscovery has actually taken place rather than mere re-colonization of an area. Such a list of local rediscoveries seems never to have been attempted before, probably on account of it being a monumental task, so I thought that I would attempt to fill that niche.

The following list contains the scientific names of 152 possibly extinct species and subspecies of recent butterflies and moths. This includes several taxa not currently listed in the database. I stress that each of these species and subspecies, if taxonomically valid, are "missing" and therefore potentially extinct. This does not mean that they are definitely extinct, although several clearly are because extensive surveys throughout all known habitat has not found a single individual.

One of the planned future features of REPAD will be our own unique status categories. However this system will not be implemented until basically all potentially recently extinct species have been entered into the database. This itself is a significant task and I have not yet entered a single recently extinct plant into the database. This article is therefore more to test the waters regards the appropriateness of our own idiosyncratic status categories, and to receive feedback from visitors to the database regards any possible improvements which could be made before implementing this system.